EDUCATION NOTES INVESTIGATING ARTWORKS IN THE GALLERY www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/education 40 YEARS KALDOR PUBLIC art PROJECTS 19xx1973 ARTISTGILBERT NAME& GEORGE 1973 GILBERT & GEORGE PROJECT We want our art to speak across the barriers of knowledge directly to People about their The Singing Sculpture Life and not about their knowledge of art. The Shrubberies Number 1 The 20th century has been cursed with an The Shrubberies Number 2 art that cannot be understood. The decadent 16–21 August 1973 artists stand for themselves and their chosen Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney few, laughing at and dismissing the normal outsider. We say that puzzling, obscure and 29 August – 2 September 1973 form-obsessed art is decadent and a cruel National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne denial of the Life of People. Gilbert & George, ‘What our art means’, The charcoal and paper sculptures, 1970–1974, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux 1986, p 76 2 Art Gallery of NSW 2009 / KALDOR PUBLIC ART PROJECTS / 1973 GILBERT & GEORGE GILBERT & GEORGE Gilbert & George present The Singing Sculpture at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1973 Photo: Douglas Thompson Courtesy Art Gallery of New South Wales Art Gallery of NSW 2009 / KALDOR PUBLIC ART PROJECTS / 1973 GILBERT & GEORGE We could easily imagine – I think it would be reasonable, 1973 anyway – that the pair’s robo-movements, their posing, their never-changing suits, and Georg’s unlikely made- GILBERT up Prince Charles accent, are all part of the same package of insulating themselves against a world that & GEORGE is hostile to their particular sexuality – their badge of defiant otherness. Matthew Collings, Independent, Weekend Review, 6 November 1999, p 5 INTRODUCTION a deteriorating London, from commercial pornographic material to images of religious fanaticism. By the late 1980s, they were Gilbert & George are now among the most famous living British creating stained-glass colourised photo-pieces incorporating artists. Four decades ago, they adopted the identity of ‘living faeces and bodily fluids in reaction to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. sculptures’, becoming not only creators, but also the art itself. In 2008, Gilbert & George were the subject of the largest Their unflagging impersonality and assiduous staging of retrospective exhibition ever staged by London’s Tate Modern. everyday events and social rituals – as art – was remarkable and uncanny in 197 when they visited Australia for their Kaldor project, and remains so today. Although they no longer present PROJECT works in the same form, and are now perhaps better known for John Kaldor invited Gilbert & George to present The Singing their pictures and films, The Singing Sculpture is recognised as Sculpture in Australia in 197, after Christo and Jeanne-Claude the art piece that launched their artistic career. It embodies the suggested this other collaborative team to him. In the book ‘living sculpture’ concept that has informed both their art and 40 years: Kaldor Public Art Projects, he recalled their first their lives. The suits they wore for this sculpture became a sort meeting in London: ‘They walked in, like they do today, matching of prim, conservative uniform for them, and they rarely appear suits, ties, matching everything. They were very formal, friendly.’ in public unless wearing them. They dress alike, and when their For The Singing Sculpture, Gilbert & George – dressed in suits, faces are covered in metallic paint, they look alike. Rarely is with their faces, necks and hands painted in metallic paint – one of the pair to be seen without the other, and they refuse to stood on a table and sang along to an uplifting recording of the disassociate their art from their everyday lives. As Gilbert Depression-era music-hall song ‘Underneath the arches’ while phrased it: ‘Our existence became the artwork’. turning slowly in a circle and repeating a series of choreographed gestures. George recalled: ‘The important feeling we had was ARTIST that we wanted to do something attractive and emotional. We didn’t want to do this grubby, fake-serious stuff’ (Tate Etc, Gilbert issue 9, spring 2007, p 58). born 1943 in the Dolomites, Italy In early presentations, the song was played twice for a total lives and works in London, England of six minutes but some versions lasted up to eight hours. In George Australia for the Kaldor project, the song was repeated 112 times born 1942 in Devon, England each day, totalling five hours. It was presented for six days in lives and works in London, England Sydney at the Art Gallery of NSW, and then for five days at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. In both venues, Gilbert & George Passmore and Gilbert Proesch met when they were George also displayed The Shrubberies Number 1 and Number 2, students at St Martins School of Art, London. Their first major a large ‘charcoal on paper sculpture’. artwork, The Singing Sculpture, ‘happened by mistake’, according A documentary of Gilbert & George’s visit was filmed for ABC to Gilbert. ‘At the end of the year, we posed with our sculptures, TV’s Survey program by Brian Adams, capturing their presentation but we realised we didn’t need them. That was when we realised of the sculpture and their strolls across Sydney and its parks. we didn’t believe in objects’ (Tate Etc, issue 9, spring 2007). The piece was initially shown at art schools and wherever they could present it. It gained momentum and was shown 26 times between 1969 and 1972, in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Norway and Switzerland, and at the newly opened Sonnabend Gallery in New York, before they brought it to in Australia in 197 for their Kaldor project. In 1991, the sculpture was ‘dusted off’ for the anniversary exhibition of Sonnabend Gallery. ‘Art for all’ is the belief that underpins Gilbert & George’s art. They began to create films and pictures when they realised that presentations like The Singing Sculpture were extremely limited in the amount of people they could reach. These works extended the idea of living sculpture in a different form. Almost all of the images, which include images of themselves, are gathered within walking distance of their home in London’s East End. By 1975, they were producing large-format pictures, overlaid with black grids, which capture a broad range of human experience, encompassing an unexpected gamut of emotions and themes – from romantic pastoral images to urban settings of Art Gallery of NSW 2009 / KALDOR PUBLIC ART PROJECTS / 1973 GILBERT & GEORGE WORLD EVENTS: 1973 See: Hans Namuth Jackson Pollock painting 1950 Performance art explored the relation of subjectivity to art _ US troops pull out of Vietnam production along a slipstream created by abstract expressionist _ Patrick White wins Nobel Prize for Literature artists such as Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Before it was _ Sydney Opera House opens museumised and corporatised, abstract expressionism provided, _ Mobile phone invented in its free-flowing lines, an alternative model of how to be a _ Lucy Lippard publishes the book Six years: the person, of how to desire, of how to re-experience time. dematerialization of the art object 1966 to 1972 See: Yoko Ono Cut piece 196 _ Walter Benjamin’s influential 196 essay ‘The work of art in In this work, first performed in 196 in Japan and later in other the age of mechanical reproduction’ published in English venues and by other performers, Ono invited the audience to _ National Gallery of Australia controversially buys Jackson come up and cut away her clothing as she sat motionless on Pollock’s Blue poles the stage. _ First Biennale of Sydney held at the Sydney Opera House Gallery See: Joseph Beuys Explaining pictures to a dead hare 1965 _ Gilbert & George present The Singing 3rd Kaldor project: Some performance works plug in to indigenous energies through Sculpture and exhibit The Shrubberies at the Art Gallery of tribal ritual, positioning the artist as teacher, activist, shaman, NSW and Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria healer. Unlike literal communication or pure entertainment, ritual _ 4th Kaldor project: Miralda creates Coloured feast at the is about transformation of consciousness by intensity of John Kaldor Fabricmaker showrooms in Sydney and Coloured concentration and the transformation of meaning and symbols. bread at the Art Gallery of NSW In Beuys’ conversation with a dead hare (a traditional symbol of fecundity), the artist – wearing a magnetic sole on one foot and felt on the other – is connecting to the ancient cycles of death THEME and rejuvenation. Performance art See: Chris Burden Shoot piece 1971 In performance art, works in a variety of media are premeditated For this performance piece (also known simply as Shoot), Burden and then executed before a live audience. Although this might was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about appear to be ‘theatre’, theatrical performances present five metres. Many saw it as a statement about both the war in representations of events, while performance art presents Vietnam and the right to bear arms that is enshrined in the US actual events as art. constitution. An open-ended artform, performance art can have many different variables, often with a renovating experience of time and space See: Mike Parr Integration 3 (leg spiral) 1975 (long or short in duration, intimate or spectacular in scale). It can Australian artist Parr lit a fuse that spiralled around his leg to work outside the context of museums and gallery spaces and demonstrate his increasing concern with the relationship between draws freely on many disciplines and media (narrative, poetry, action and catharsis. music, dance, architecture, video, slides), often putting the body See: Sam Hsieh Cage piece 1978–79 squarely at the centre of art-making.